I have long thought that Martin Kettle was the doyen of the Grauniad's salaried columnists, the one with the best understanding of the new reality post the 2008 crash. In today's paper, under the headline "Austerity is here to stay", he writes, "We may have come out of recession again, but the idea that Britain, let alone the countries of the eurozone, can expect to see any resumption of the kind of growth rates to which we have all been accustomed since the second world war, is increasingly fanciful. We are living through not a downturn but an epochal change, and we need to make a more consistent effort to understand what this implies."
This is a long way from the Graun's usual take on things, which you might summarise as "If only the bankers hadn't been so greedy everything would have been OK". And if you read the comments on Kettle's article on the Graun's website it's clear that it's a long way from the views of the readership. But actually the bankers were only trying to find new and more imaginative ways of enabling the West to carry on borrowing. That they were lining their pockets at the same time doesn't make them any more attractive, but we shouldn't lose sight of the activity which enabled them to do so. If anything, the bankers helped the consumer party to carry on longer than it would have done, and otherwise we would have been facing these problems somewhat sooner.
I'm not sure Kettle fully understands the consequences of perpetual austerity however. "Although the 20th century social democratic project may have stalled amid economic decline", he says, "the financial crisis has undoubtedly opened up a fresh opportunity to redefine the terms on which the rich and poor can coexist in times of greater scarcity". This may be true up to a point, but what might any new definition look like? The problem with the rich is that although they are conspicuous, there aren't many of them. If you tax them till the pips squeak you still won't raise a fraction of the sums needed to carry on paying Britain's welfare bills. Austerity has not so much opened up a fresh opportunity as driven a stake through the social democratic project's heart. For the project depended on huge amounts of government spending, and as Liam Byrne famously admitted, there's no money left.
Amidst th' encircling gloom I am heartened to see in the same edition of the Graun a story to the effect that Michael Gove is going to change the current official definition of poverty. Presently this utilises the median income as a benchmark. I have been railing against it for years, because it means that in a rich country like Monaco there are people with a BMW on the drive and a yacht down at the marina who are officially poor, and people in a poor country like Bangladesh existing on a dollar a day who aren't. What kind of definition is that?
Well, one which has been revealed in all its uselessness by the fall in the median income post 2008. As the most common salary level in Britain has fallen, thousands of people have been removed from offical poverty. You couldn't make it up. Fatuous, and the sooner the definition reflects absolute poverty the better.
